Thank you! (+ winner!)

Thank you so much for visiting my blog this weekend. I enjoyed reading all of your comments; it made me feel a little toasty, seeing how many people were wishing for spring!

Today I printed and cut out all the comments. (I know, random integers, but there were so many, it was truly easier this way!) I handed it over to the boy not watching Star Wars:

And he drew this:

*Denise* said...

Adorable layout! Love the way you incorporated the ticket to the event in you design!

February 27, 2011 7:11 AM

Congratulations! Please contact me with your full name and address at jennyrahnlarson at yahoo dot com!

Sketch Support blog hop!

*If you are just starting at my blog, make sure you begin at the Sketch Support blog to begin the hop!

Welcome to the blog hop to get to know the design team for Sketch Support! My name is Jennifer Larson, AKA Buffy fan. I am a high school English teacher, wife to a Star Wars fan, mother to two boys, and resident of Minnesota.

The hop is running today, February 26, and tomorrow, February 27. If you leave a comment on each blog, you get a chance at some individual prizes on each blog, as well as a chance at another prize from Sketch Support!

In addition to many chances at prizes, I hope you enjoy going from blog to blog, seeing the wonderful takes on this sketch:

*If you want a downloadable version of the sketch, please get it at Sketch Support.

Here's what I did with it (click on the images to see them bigger):




Supplies: Cardstock: Bazzill, Stampin' Up! Patterned Paper: Doodlebug, October Afternoon, Fancy Pants. Punches: EK Success. Envelope: Bazzill. Wheel and ink: Stampin' Up! Rub on letters: Maya Road. Corrugated Alpha: Jillibean Soup. Floss: DMC. Pen: Zig. Other supplies: buttons, machine thread.

I took the general orientation of the photos, but I didn't print them in a special size. I just used the ones I had, following the general design of the sketch. I decided not to use stars, instead going with circles to suggest baseball. As I always do on my baseball pages, I included the tickets, this time in an old Bazzill coin envelope.

To grunge up the kraft background a bit, I used a Stampin' Up! texture wheel with some light brown ink. The scallops are made with circle punches. I cut them in half, then stitched to mask any irregular cuts.

Here's a few details about me:

When it comes to paper crafting I am...fairly tidy. By that I mean design. I have trouble with random, though I admire it profusely in others!

Where do you craft? Primarily in an easy chair in my living room. I use a lap desk to work on, and I store my partial projects on the ottoman. Miracle of miracles that I haven't seen any layouts destroyed.

When I am creating, these are the things I have to have around me...a cup of tea, an episode of Bones, my mini letter stickers, my DMC, and my patterned paper. Plus my cat.

When I am not creating, you can find me...spending time with my boys (all three of them, one of whom is my husband), gardening, swimming, grading papers, cross-stitching, or baking cookies.

When it comes to sketches I...tend to make them fit the stories and photos that I have. I use them for orientation and inspiration more than exact measurements.

Thank you for visiting my blog! Feel free to scroll around, and please sign up to follow if you want to keep track of my posts. And be sure to leave a comment to get a chance to earn the following prize (ETA picture):


A selection of some hot products from Studio Calico, including rub-ons and notions. These rub-ons are very high quality--they look more like digital accents than rub-ons, they go on so smoothly! These are a must have.

So leave a comment here, letting me know something you are looking forward to this month, and be sure to go to the next person on the blog hop, which is Shari Thurman. Here is the whole order of the hop:

Sketch Support Blog

Jennifer

Shari (go here next!)


Amy

Melissa

Jill

Christy

Tammy

Suzanna

Christina

Noey

Katrina

Carolyn

Mireille

Allison

So enjoy the rest of the blog hop, have a great weekend, and happy scrapping! Be sure to check back on Monday to see if you won.

Time warp, the photo edition

My mother is out in Minnesota visiting us for Dominic's birthday. She came with two small boxes of photos from my childhood, something I never had myself. So I have spent the week leafing through stacks of gems like this:

My husband refers to this as the money shot. Remember underoos? I didn't until I saw this. I had also forgotten I wanted to be Wonder Woman. But who didn't? (BTW, I couldn't get the red eye corrector on PSE 7 to work on this photo. If anyone has a suggestion, please let me know!)

Here's another beaut:
Check out the glasses and the socks. I remember this trip, not the details but the fact that my mom made sure to take us when we lived in Jacksonville. Thanks, Mom.

I'm sad to see that I have a camera here, but I don't have any pictures. I bet I threw them away because they weren't good. I'm kind of like that, or I was at that age. So right now, when I give disposable cameras to my boys, I print the photos and put them in little photo albums for them.

Here's another lovely one:

One's bikini is not complete if one is not wearing a cowboy hat too!

Another money shot. I wanted to be a ballerina too, even though I'm kind of clumsy.

I plan on scanning all the photos. I've set up a folder on my computer for the edited scans. All of the above shots I tweaked in PSE 7, just doing an autocorrect and color correction; that was needed because many photos were rescued from those evil auto-adhesive albums that killed photos in the 70s.

So what am I doing with this? I have taken inspiration from Ella's latest ebook:

How to Scrapbook Your Personal Heritage by Aby Garvey and Wendy Smedley gives LOTS of hints for using photos like these winners to capture stories from farther back in the past, which
is helpful when the stories from way back when might be vague, but our current feelings are just as relevant, and just as much of a story to boot.

For me, I put together two photo collages to scrap. Here's the stories I'll record:

1. All my Wonder Woman shots. I found three. That definitely warrants a page.
2. All the photos of me in upper elementary where I wasn't smiling with an open mouth. This is a little bit sad. I had horrible teeth and was really self-conscious about smiling with an open mouth. I don't want my boys to feel that way, so I'll scrap something about that.

When I finish these pages, I'll post what I do with them, along with some inspiration and a little giveaway! Look for that next week.

This weekend, look for a blog hop with the Sketch Support gals. Buckets of prizes await...

Telling the stories

I have a hard time answering the question, "Why do you scrap?" For me, it's not one thing. I love pairing photos with pretty product and writing the story down. It's a nice stress reliever to sort through patterned paper at night. Learning something new always invigorates me. I love making meaning out of my life.

If I had to choose any, I would choose the latter. When I spend time trying to figure out why I want to scrap something, I figure out the reasons, specifically, the reason why this moment/event/ person is important. I feel like this helps me live a life of purpose. That's important. Not everything I scrap is serious, and playing with pretty paper feeds my creative soul (and is probably helping to sustain the economy!), but everything I scrap has meaning. My only dissatisfying pages are the rare instances when I create a page for which I never found a purpose.

Here's my two latest purposeful pages (click on the images to view them larger):




This was my latest Project 12 venture. I used Studio Calico's Who's Who. To bring out the rich colors of the paper, I used a Pioneer Woman action called Boost, which increases the color and darkens the image a bit. I'm also trying to get over the fact that I still can't sew straight.


This page warms my heart. I love love love this paper from Studio Calico. When I get a paper like this, where the whole paper is too beautiful to cover, I don't. I use fewer photos and product and try to work my design into the paper's design. In this case, I tucked everything behind one of the trees, in some cases literally: I tucked the photo and title into a slit in the paper. And the inspiration for this page--the series of notes my son left me--are in an envelope on the back of the page.

Just for information's sake, I also used Who's Who for this page, and I used the Boost action on this page as well.

My internet is a little wonky right now--it ceases to work after about a half hour, which I'm taking as God's way of telling me to get off the computer and go do something. So, today I shall probably be spending time attending my cousins' children's birthday party, shoveling snow, and editing heritage photos my mom brought to me (this is technically on the computer, but oh well). My husband says there's some money shots in these photos. If you want a good laugh, check back in later this week for some peeks into my scarily dressed, too-big-eyeglasses, crooked teeth past, in which I apparently loved Wonder Woman and wanted to be a ballerina.

One more reminder: Laura, if I don't hear from you by tomorrow, I'll choose another winner for the scrapbooking sketches book! Gotta get people scrapping!

Busy week and a big day

Man, has this been a busy week! Preparing for my mom to fly out from Maine, my son's yearly IEP meeting, grading like a maniac, working on pages for upcoming articles and blog posts...whew! Thank goodness for four-day weekends. I can now get caught up.

First, you should head over to Sketch Support to check out this week's page. Here it is:



The details of how I did the heart as well as the original sketch are on Sketch Support.

And the big day? Well, 7 years ago this guy was born:


He is such a funny guy. He could barely sleep last night in excitement for today, then he woke up super early this morning. He asked me, "What's special about being 7?" I told him 7 is a magical number, there are 7 days in the week, and it means he's in first grade. Then I asked him what he thought was special about it, and he said, "The other numbers are scared of it." I asked him why and he said, "Because 7-8-9." (Say it out loud.) What a card.

This past year has been up and down, not uncommon for first graders but complicated due to his autism. I dreaded the IEP, but it was a positive experience, focusing very much on problem solving, rather than what he can't do. That warmed my heart. His biggest challenge is developing flexibility in routines and the ability to take other perspectives.

About a week ago, I was sharing with a teacher colleague at the high school some of my anxieties about his challenging year. She is a communication teacher who works with students with autism, and her words reassured me. She drew a series of circle in the air with her finger that moved gradually upward and said, "This is how kids with autism progress. It's not a straight line." Her words reassured me and inspired this page:




I used the Studio Calico January kit Who's Who for this page. The journaling is basic: Two steps forward and one step back is still Progress. I debated journaling more extensively, detailing what's happened this year, but I didn't want to right now. Today I wanted to focus on his progress, so there it is.

Happy Birthday, Dominic.

Valentine's Day Sale at Ella!

If you are feeling the need to gift yourself this Valentine's Day, here's something at Ella for you:

As we all know, there's nothing little old Cupid likes better than making
two people fall in love. Cute couples are his game.

So, today YOU get to play Cupid by making your own "cute couple"! (Out
of eBooks, that is.)

Select any two regular-price eBooks on Ella's website
that you think would make the perfect pair, and then select a third eBook to get
for free! Simply place all three selections in your cart and apply the code
INLOVE11 during checkout. (Discount applied to least expensive product.) Use
your discount by February 15, 2011. Only one per Cupid...er, customer.

The winner is...

Laura said...

I mostly do 2-page LOs, but the sketch support website has shown me some good ideas for 1pagers. Love your work! Thanks for the opportunity to win!!

February 11, 2011 8:34 PM

Laura, please contact me at jennyrahnlarson at yahoo dot com to give me your mailing address so I can send the book out to you!

Giveaway!

I've enjoyed being on Sketch Support, my second design team. It is such fun to get the sketches in my email, thinking ahead to what I could do with them.

Here's one I did with last month's one page sketch (click on the image to see it larger):


I actually sent this layout to my dad for Christmas. He looks great in the picture, and look! They caught fish! Teeny bullheads, but still.

Just some design notes: I sanded the edges to the photos to make them stand out more, and I added the stitching and stamps for some texture, great for a page about boys. The grid stamp, but the way, is to resemble a fishing net. That's about as themey as I can get.

Photography-wise, I added a Pioneer Woman action to the photos called Boost. It drenched the colors with more intense color without getting to bright, nice for an autumn LO.

This past month I was sent not only sketches, but supplies from Jillibean Soup (yum) and two of these, one for me and one for a lucky reader:


Sketches for Scrapbooking 7, a terrific idea book filled with two-page sketches. Maybe you don't need that many two-page idea jumpers? Use them to spark ideas for one page, like I did with this one:

Or make a two page spread, like with this one:

If you want to put your name in the hat for this copy of the book, leave a comment on this post by Sunday, February 13, 8 P.M. CST. Be sure to check back Monday and see who won!

A Year of Dates

This week's sketch at Sketch Support helped me make one of my favorite layouts ever. Here it is:

This past year my husband and I managed to get out of the house at night, together, without kids. Miracle! Definietly scrapworthy. I used a lot of the terrific Jillibean Soup supplies from their Pasta Fagioli line. Perfect, since many of our dates involved food.

Warm weather memories

I met someone at CHA who had been to Minnesota a few weeks ago. She was so funny, saying, "I knew it would be cold, but the wind just hurt!" Well, today is one of those days where the wind hurts. You just sort of have to cover your face up or you will be in pain.

Days like this I like to scrap summer photos, so I dug into my pile to scrap a baseball game we saw last summer. The layout includes a lot less white space than I prefer, but I think I stayed true to my linear self regardless:

I had four photos I wanted on the LO. I probably would have made a two-pager, except I will also scrap our first game, and that one will definitely be two pages. So I did what often needs to be done: I trimmed the photos down to 4x4 to make them fit easily.

My second design decision involved product: I don't have baseball product, nor do I want to buy such specifically themed products. I have done that in the past, and I love those layouts, but I don't like how limited I am in using those supplies, so I tried something different. I picked happy, bright colors, especially the baseball green background paper. I had some red to go with our shirts (go Twins!), but I needed to make it a little less Christmasy, so I added yellow. A plethera of round things (patterned paper, brads, buttons) are suggesting baseballs without actually going there.

One final thing I did was typical for me: I included the tickets, which had some lovely pictures on them, each one different. I didn't want to adhere them, and I wanted them to be visible, so I made a little pocket (sort of) out of Grafix craft plastic. I inked the edges with Stayzon to make it visible, then I adhered it with brads.

And what made the game memorable? Some severe weather had been heading our way, so Carl Pavano did his duty and pitched a complete game win in under two hours. When we left the game, the rain came down, hard. Perfect timing!

Most important moments

Last August I participated in Big Picture Classes' Big Idea Festival. I loved it, but I was particularly inspired by Jen Mohler's idea to scrap the 100 most important moment of my life. Here was moment 1:

I had just come into these photos, so scrapping moment 1 seemed a perfect beginning.

I had hoped to scrap a moment a month, but a lack of childhood photos made me neglect this goal. (Note to self: Ask my mom for more photos!) I have, however, been staring at some photos of me and my growing-up dogs, which made me think of a later moment, moment 58.

I scanned the older photos, resized them, and repaired them somewhat (they had minor scratches on them). I also printed a photo I loved of my dog Roswell and me, taken the year she died. Following a similar layout design as my first page, I created this one:






I had the felt dog left over from a kit. I remember debating throwing it away; I'm glad I didn't. I also added some of my typical stitching: a running stitch around the layout, as well as some machine stitching through the title and journaling. Broke a needle doing that, gosh darn it. Twice. X%&#!

Some of the papers come from the Basic Grey Max and Whiskers line. I also picked some older Pink Paislee papers that seemed to match.

Most important to me was the journaling. Here it is:

Growing up, my dog was Ben, a yellow lab we bought when I was about 14. He was so good-natured, I loved just to sit on the floor petting him all afternoon. As he grew older, he started to develop bloody noses: he’s sneeze, and the mucus was tinged with red. His vet never found anything wrong, though.

When I came back from college during the summer in 1994, there was a dramatic change. Like a faucet that had been turned on, blood poured out of his nose in a continuous stream. I ran to my mother in a panic, who told me the nosebleeds had been like this for a while. At his next doctor’s appointment, we learned that Ben had a tumor that would ultimately kill him.

At this point we decided that we needed to put Ben down, so we gave him a dog day: we fed him his favorite foods (cheese and strawberries) and took him to the lake to swim. It was a fun romp, but tinged with melancholy, knowing it would be his last.

On the way home, wind now swirling and rain beating down, we stopped at the vet’s, where we had an appointment to put him to sleep. Here’s where I failed Ben: Given the chance to stay with him until he died or leave him with the vet to do it, I left him to the vet. I couldn’t face it. My mother stayed, though, holding him until he died and walking home afterwards in the rain.

My failure to be with Ben in his final minutes haunts me. This dog had been such a good pet, and I had loved him through his life, but not at the end. My failure taught me that when I buy a pet, I need to commit to it through life and death. I swore I would never again leave a pet alone to die, so when Roswell developed liver disease in 2009 and we had to put her down, I stayed with her until she died, fulfilling my promise to Ben.

Archivers and local scrapbook stores, purchase this!

My LSS is Archivers, a wonderful store in Maple Grove with fabulous staff. Someday I will do a page about the store because it's my Cheers: I walk in and they say, "Jenny!" sort of like "Norm!" So how excited was I to see the buyers from Archivers on my flight out to CHA. I never noticed them again while there, but at each booth that I could, I asked the staff if Archivers had been by and what they were buying.

Not willing just to wait and wish, I'd like to put out this request to Archivers and my other favorite local scrapbook stores to go out and purchase this totally cool, cannot live without stuff I saw at CHA:

1. Pink Paislee Hometown Summer and Daily Junque. These two lines were just superb. I loved the entire collection of Hometown Summer, especially the die cut cards, which should be priced affordably. I also loved the wooden letters in the 'Junk.



2. Unity Stamps. I loved the Calendar Month, Tell Me More (speech bubble with journaling lines), Heaartfelt Sentiment Set, Here's the Ticket, Every Single Day, All About the Journey, Hey Girlfriend, Spotted Owl Soup...just yum.


3. Webster's Pages embellishments. These mini blooms were just delicious, and they would be easy to use on several pages. Plus, I'm going to Maine again in another year, so Yacht Club would be great to see (hello, Mr. Lobster).



4. Sassafras Starters. This was just such a fun set of papers, reminiscent of BG Basics, but more playful.


5. Bella Blvd Sophisticates letter stickers. Please please please please.


6. My Cute Stamps Mustaches. These were just so much fun.The Let It Snow set also had some of the nicest snowflake stamps I've seen.


7. Crate Paper Toy Box. I loved all their lines--seriously--but this one was terrific, a boy line that stood out from a crowd of very nice boys lines from many manufacturers, including Bella Blvd, BoBunny, and October Afternoon.

On that note...

8. October Afternoon Rocket Age. It is themey, but man, is it terrific. I am in love.


9. Lily Bee Happily Lost stamps, Stationery paper, and This and That collection. Love the empty postage stamp on the first, the distressed basics on the second, and the colors in the third.


10. Jillibean Soup Kraft mini alphas and chipboard alphas. I love the rough and tumble look of these.


11. Hambly mutache prints and GCD Funhouse line (especially the 'staches). These make me want to grow facial hair. Fun accessory if you have boys.


12. Melissa Frances backdrops and envelopes and tags. Nice for wall art and hidden journaling. Affordable too.


13. Echo Park For the Record. My heart sings when I see this. I just might scrap the catalog cover, it's so pretty.


14. Quickutz dies. Nesting Pennants, Mustaches (again), DIY Pennant, Pennants, Houndstooth, Ruffles, and Rings. Sigh.



15. The Girls' Paperie Kitsch. A brighter vintage that would easily transfer to boy pages, even with flowers. Not that flowers have ever held me back.


16. The Crafter's Workshop misting templates. So so gorgeous. And easy to look super creative, even though they are easy to use.


17. Cosmo Cricket small embellishments. I know Archivers carries the paper and stickers, but trust me, I will buy a TON of these tiny things. I might even fight for them. Readers, don't get in my way.


18. Studio Calico mists. I know that Tattered Angels is A's big mist, but is it the best? It's a matter of opinion, I guess, but these are so high quality, why not put it out there for customers to choose?


19. My Little Shoebox City by the Bay. These were the nicest houses I saw, plus the brick paper. So so cute.

Look how it's used in this apron:


And while I'm at it, why why why aren't you stocking the little letter stickers? So cute!


20. Little Yellow Bicycle summer line. I love the journaling tags (both kinds) and the glitter transparency bits.

21. Technique Tuesday stamps. So many beautiful stamps, I am going to go bankrupt this year.



There was so much more, but these were the ones that have me drooling in a serious way.